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Thursday, May 17, 2012

A Writer Has A Lover's Quarrel With The Internet

Internet
and I were at a Starbucks and it was one of those weekdays at two o'clock when
the place was quiet. People were softly
chatting at a couple of tables. One
young man, about seventeen or eighteen, typed quietly on his laptop. Internet
was in my Toshiba Satellite, and I pulled her closer so we could converse
through the camera and speakers.

Internet
put a face on the screen. It was one of
those video game Lara Croft type faces.
I knew she was teasing me, but it revealed her anxiety.

"Cut
it out," I said. "Use your
real face...the one we agreed on."

Internet
changed to a convincing human visage.
She had red-brown hair and freckles and looked like a student at
Cambridge or Oxford. I've always been a
sucker for smart English girls.
Internet was still teasing, though. She was wearing round Harry Potter glasses. She was trying to be funny, but they looked
good on her and she didn't know it.

We both
started speaking at precisely the same moment.

"Well...I,
uh..."

"You
go first," Internet said, in her upper crust English accent.

"We've
been together a long time," I said.
"Ever since my first Mac Notebook."

Internet
appeared to shudder and for a moment there was a screen with little green
battleships scooting back and forth.
Then she regained her "face".

"It's
me," she said. "Not you. I'm the one who's changed."

"We've
both changed, and it's good, it's great...," I said, "but something
has gone away, something has been lost."

"What? What?
There's nothing lost. My
god! Look what I can do now, look at
the size of the files you can upload into me.
And, ....well...I can download into you..." Her shoulders wiggled with a sensual
shimmy. "I love it!"

"That
part of our relationship has been better than ever," I said. "Our...uh...connection speed has been
fabulous. It's uh...uh..."

"What? It's what?" She was getting impatient.

"This
is hard to say," I waffled.

"Just
come out with it!"

"Okay,
okay. I think you've become all about
money."

"Oh
bullshit!" Internet's face turned a shade more red. Her complexion was already rosy, but I knew
I had hit a nerve. "I make money,
you make money, everybody makes money on the internet. What are you complaining about! Come on, tell me the truth."

"It's
true, but I feel like I'm walking through some of those sticky cobwebs that you keep brushing your
head to get the stuff off but it never comes off. I don't know what's happening any more."

My hand
trembled as I drank a swig of lukewarm cappuccino. It was all closing in on me; I felt confused and
embarrassed. There was a silence. Internet looked guilty.

I don't
know why I blurted out the next words.
I had promised myself not to act jealous.

"It's
Google, isn't it?"

Internet
looked even more guilty. "What do
you mean, 'It's Google'?

My mind
was beginning to clear. The cobwebby
feeling started falling away from me.
"You've sold out to Google.
Everything is owned and run by Google.
There aren't websites any more.
There are web colonies that are being run by web empires. Everything I post shows up on a hundred
other websites. I can't scratch my nuts
without a link appearing on Facebook, Rotten Tomatoes or Twitter: Art Rosch
just scratched his nuts. Do you want to
be his Friend?"

Internet's
face dissolved into chaos, then put itself back together. Maybe the connection went down. Maybe Internet was laughing. There was a shadowy figure of Winston
Churchill on Internet's forehead. Down
by her chin was the monster from "Alien" but it was quickly disappearing. .

"Okay,
I have to come clean, get this stuff off my chest," she said. "I've been bought up by a handful of
corporations. Tell you the truth, I
don't know what's going on, I don't have a clue. I'm getting new software thrown at me so fast, I can't handle
it." A tear slid down her
cheek. "I'm crashing all the
time!"

I barely
heard her. I was reflecting on the
experiences of the last few weeks.

"Tell
me about it," I said, at last.
"It seems like every day I'm asked to join another social
network. What the hell is Pinterp? Or Floosbock? Like an idiot, I join them and the software is a complete
mystery. All I want to do is write
books and promote them. But everyone's
got a book! My inbox is ninety percent
book promos. What do I have to write to
get people's attention? Seems like it's
all

There are fifty million writers trying to sell their
first novel. If you can't get an agent,
that's okay, E-Publish your book and let Amazon sell it! And that works out great, you sell maybe ten
copies and the book sinks into the abyss of forgotten novels."

"Calm
down," Internet said. "Things
will work out. We'll get through this
glitch. I'll help you promote your books."

Her eyes
were cast down and then she looked up at me with her head still lowered. It was a very cute look, very seductive.

I moused
over to the UPLOAD button and clicked.
My new draft was a blue bar that crossed a rectangular box. Percentage figures rode along the bottom. It took about a minute. Internet's face was rapt. Her mouth was half open and her eyes
glistened. The blue bar reached the end of the box and the new draft appeared
on the screen.

"OH!"
Internet sighed. "OH! OH! You're
right. This is a much better book. I know it's awful to be a writer. It even
more awful to be really great and still get ignored. I know it breaks your heart."

I didn't
say anything. I thought about all the
work, all the years I spent working on the craft of writing. "Yes," I said at last. "It breaks my heart."

Internet
was recovering her composure. She had
read the new draft and I knew she was proud of me.

"Don't
ever give up writing," she said. "Never. You MUST keep writing.
This is amazing stuff. There is
nothing else like it."

I opened
the page on my book blog and filled my monitor screen with the cover. I looked at my design. I looked at the starry cosmos and the
elongated objects that resembled fiery colliding worlds. It was a work in progress but it wasn't
kitsch, it was faithful to the spirit of the book. It was a really cool book cover.

"Don't
worry, babe. I can't quit writing. I'm not capable of quitting writing, no
matter how much it breaks my heart. To
paraphrase an old motto," I said, 'You'll have to pry my keyboard from my
cold dead fingers.'"

"That's
my man," Internet said. "I know I'll go on changing, but great art is
timeless. I'll be loyal to you, I
promise."

I
couldn't quite make myself trust the promise.
It made me sad. But it left room
for hope.

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